Houses in the St. Michael's development sit next to a oil and gas production facility in west Greeley near 71st Avenue and Highway 34. The oil and gas industry has made immense strides through the years to lessen their footprint, and operate more environmentally friendly -- contrary to the rape and pillage idea many have about the industry.

Noble Energy's Wells Ranch central processing facility was comissioned in October. It is the first of many Noble plans to build to consolidate oil and gas gathering and processing operations in the Wattenberg Field. Teh move is expected to take trucks off the road and result in less surface damage to well sites.

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Glennis Hefton and her husband moved into St. Michael’s subdivision, an upscale neighborhood in west Greeley, five years ago.

Two years later, an oil and gas production facility became one of their newest neighbors, directly across 29th Street at 70th Avenue.

“We had a homeowners association meeting and talked about it. The company addressed our concerns,” she said. “They were explicit in what they would do. I really wasn’t that concerned.”

The company planted trees around the fencing of the area and helped neighborhood aesthetics, she said.

“We didn’t have any trees to begin with,” Hefton said.

Though she can’t give any specific reasons, her health has improved in that time. It might just be the garden with fresh veggies outside, which is downwind of the massive oil storage tanks.

She’ll start to worry when the zucchini goes bad, she joked.

“It’s not out of sight, out of mind. We’re on our back deck a lot” and see the oil and gas facility, she said. “It’s not an eyesore.”

While the drilling frenzy has intensified, operators have had to become increasingly sensitive to their neighbors, often making concessions with their operations, such as sound and light barriers or extra landscaping.

But few may realize the behind-the-scenes environmental work that goes into day to day operations and the technological innovation that has made drilling that much less of an environmental impact.

“These big oil companies really have jumped on that (environmental) bandwagon and clamped down so tight, it’s amazing,” said Lew Ladwig, a construction manager with Tetra Tech, which helps build oil field infrastructure.

Companies today are devoting a surprising amount of time, innovation and energy into reducing their footprints and safeguarding the land, air and water, all while they help bring the country into an era of energy independence.

That’s one of the reasons why it has become commonplace, at least in Weld County, to see storage tanks next door to posh neighborhoods, or plans for massive drilling in the middle of residential subdivisions.

The industry, ruled by pages of state and federal regulations, are operating by the outdoors mantra of “leave no trace” or, if they must, “leave only tire tracks.”

“The oil patch just goes way over the top to make sure absolutely nothing happens because they don’t want to have that black eye,” Ladwig said. “When you have a disaster, like the Gulf accident, it’s such a huge black eye, it costs millions.”

Gone are the days of leaving produced water in pits to evaporate. No longer do crews just bury leftover drilling mud and walk away, or ignore a spill.

Produced water is recycled, companies are converting fleets to cleaner burning natural gas — in some cases right off the wellhead. They pipe in water to keep truck traffic off the road, and many are moving toward piping product directly from the wellhead to processing plants, avoiding tank storage altogether.

Welcome to the world of cleaner, earth-friendlier oil and gas operations.

The old days

About 100 years ago, few understood the dangers to the land from drilling. Few noticed. Back then, the country was big and there were enough wide-open spaces to allow for a little rape-and-pillage-the-land mentality.

“There were no environmental laws way back when the oil business took off,” Ladwig said. “A guy could come out and, by whatever method he could figure out to get oil to the surface to sell it, it was perfectly acceptable and no one cared. Now, we’re realizing we have a lot smaller country than what we used to think and it’s full of people.”

The industry has been plagued by three big events in the last several years that prompted major societal concern over oil and gas operations:

» A spill offshore in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969 in which 3 million gallons of crude spilled into the ocean 5 miles from the shore. That was probably the biggest single event to prompt citizens to form groups to advocate for the protection of the environment.

» The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 in the Prince William Sound in the Gulf of Alaska, which spilled between 250,000 and 750,000 barrels of crude, eventually covering 1,300 miles of coastline that took several years to clean up.

» The most recent spill, the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which occurred because of a rig explosion that spilled up to 5 million barrels of oil for 87 days before engineers could find a solution to cap the well.

Such events shock the system, and sometimes result in knee-jerk regulatory actions. Many in the industry say companies have shouldered the burden of policing themselves as a result.

Several practices have gradually changed through the years, but technology has made those changes that much better, and they’re coming at a faster clip. Oil field officials laud the technology that has allowed drilling to occur with a much lighter footprint.

“From what we were doing in the ’80s to what we’re doing now, it’s off the charts,” said Ed Holloway, CEO of Synergy Resources, an oil and gas exploration company out of Platteville. “I can’t think of any company not wanting to be environmentally sensitive.”

Pete Stark, an oil and gas analyst with IHS in Englewood, said the level of understanding of oil and gas industry’s role in climate change has increased through the years, and has resulted in safer practices.

“There’s a whole practice of operational excellence underway in the oil and gas industry,” Stark said.

He pointed to companies’ conversion to natural gas from diesel in trucks and rigs in the field, the shift to multi-well drilling from pads; and piping in water, to name a few.

Others cite drilling practices that now prevent anything from the well to touch the ground, and a reduction of flaring off excess gas by using vapor recovery units that suck vapors back into the pipelines, instead of seeping into the air.

Even fracking practices — which have been in use for 60 years — have changed since they were coupled with horizontal drilling in just five short years. Companies used to use petroleum derivatives in fracking fluid, but no more.

“That practice has all but been abandoned,” Stark said. “In northeast Colorado, most of the fracking and chemicals they’re using they guarantee have zero carcinogens being injected.”

Holloway said a lot of fracking fluid is nothing more than soapy water.

But as new drilling methods come about, it’s opened a whole new way for companies to work on efficiencies in the field.

Holloway likens the changes to the old days, when he was growing up in Fort Morgan.

“Everybody burned their trash in their backyards,” Holloway said. “We don’t do those things anymore. We get better. Every industry gets better over time.”

Horizontal + fracking = innovation

The advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has made so much innovation possible that company officials can literally see a day when no one will even notice an oil and gas facility in the fields.

Years ago, when vertical drilling was the norm in the field, companies were putting several wells into the ground, amounting to almost a Swiss cheese effect. Every well had to have the rigs, the trucks and the storage tanks, and they’ve dotted the land since the ’70s.

In the last three years, companies have moved toward horizontal drilling, in which one well is drilled vertically and it shoots off horizontally into the pay zone thousands of feet below the surface. By fracking at several stages, one well alone can produce what 16 wells could produce vertically.

That means there is one well-production site instead of 16. The practice reduces the amount of time the companies spend disturbing the surface, the truck traffic, and the amount of industrial machines on each site.

As technology keeps improving, so do the wells. Today, several wells can be drilled from one spot, and horizontal wells can be drilled to the many pay zones and different formations beneath the ground, all with the same disturbance as one vertical well did back in the day.

“Go back to when Noble and Anadarko were announcing 1,000 to 1,500 vertical wells. Now they’re announcing 350 horizontal wells,” Holloway said. “Hello. Horizontal drilling is an environmentally friendly event going on in Weld County.”

Noble and Anadarko, Weld’s two largest operators, have led the way in innovation, varied exploration and experimentation to reduce their footprints.

Both companies are working to centralize all their facilities to run like well-oiled machines beneath the surface, taking a lot of the machinery, storage and truck traffic off the land.

Noble is building a central liquid natural gas facility in the field to take natural gas off the wellhead and fuel its fleet, and use it to convert drilling rigs and well head operations to use their own natural gas.

Companies have increasingly moved toward recycling produced water from wells and re-using it into new wells.

The list of innovations will continue to grow as engineers discovery better ways to operate.

“The oil industry really in the last 10 years accelerated that improvement and it is fun to watch,” Holloway said. “It’s very encouraging. Minds have changed as to how we practice, how we’re good neighbors in the field.”

A change in mindset

With any drilling boom comes increased activity and increased concern over the effect it has on surrounding neighbors and uses.

In his 32 years in the industry, Noble’s Wattenberg Operations Chief Dan Kelly has increasingly spent more time on environmental issues facing his operations.

“I’m spending 40 percent of my time right now … on improving and increasing efficiencies that will all have a dramatic effect on the environment,” Kelly said.

“Quite honestly, it’s enjoyable. We have opportunities, and we’re taking those opportunities very seriously, and we’re always looking for ways to decrease our overall footprint.”

Anadarko also is focused on safeguarding the land while it harvests the oil and gas.

Korby Bracken, director of environmental health and safety for Anadarko in Denver, said his staff has grown from 10 about a decade ago to 53 full-timers today, as state and federal policies have increasingly become involved in operations.

“Our role is to help make sure that people who work for Andarko are safe and are protecting the environment,” Bracken said. “As the rules have increased, we have more folks to help protect that.”

A restrictive attitude toward safety and stewardship is evident through the oil patch, Ladwig said. New hires learn quickly how it’s done or they are out the door.

“Those guys resist at first, but the safety climate is such that these oil drilling companies and all the support service companies have gotten to the point that you don’t put up with it. You either conform or you’re gone.”

Employees in and out of the field go through hours upon hours of training, Ladwig said. Companies take immense pride in what they’re doing, and they want that to rub off on their employees, Ladwig said.

“If you sit in on one of their safety trainings, the way it starts is they show some winter wheat field and a farmer out there walking the land, then the camera pans to the drill rig on the hill, and the flavor they project to employees is, ‘Here we are, harvesting energy from the ground.’ They promote that attitude at all times.”

Though the attention to detail and regulation and documentation sometimes “reaches the ridiculous,” Ladwig said, it gets the point across.

“It’s cheaper to do it right than to be sloppy and have to come back,” Ladwig said. “Cleaning up an environmental mess is tough. If you don’t make the mess in the first place…”

While the regulatory environment has gotten more strict each year, with even more future regulations bound for the rule books, oil and gas companies follow suit, Kelly said.

“We want to collaborate with regulators,” Kelly said. “We don’t look at regulation as this negative thing. We look at regulation as something that’s very important, and we want to be a real steward of the environment.”

Mindy Marshall, who moved near Hefton in St. Michaels after being displaced in the September floods, said the tanks outside her front window pose no concern as her toddler stood behind her.

“We moved here from Kersey, and they were going in there,” she said of the oil facilities. “It seems to be a fact of life these days.”

The Future

On the Wells Ranch in central Weld County, Noble Energy is embarking on a vision for its future in the Wattenberg Field by building a strategic network of facilities that take oil and gas production from the wellhead to central processing facilities through a series of underground pipelines.

“We’ll reduce land usage over time, reduce emissions, that’s air emissions from the wells themselves, that’s from trucks that run up and down the highway by taking them off road; we’ll capture our flash gas, which we’ll monetize. We’ll get more liquids out of the system,” Kelly said. “There’s just tremendous benefits to establishing this infrastructure.”

The company has created a central processing facility that takes in oil, natural gas, and water piped in from the wellhead, separates it all in one 40-acre space, recycles the water, and pipes out the oil and natural gas to the markets. It eliminates the hundreds of truck miles spent transporting them from one place to another.

It will be the first of potentially many the company will locate through it’s 600,000 plus acreage to essentially concentrate Noble’s operations.

Subsurface Weld County could soon emulate one large game board once Noble is through. Its concepts will take trucks off the road, reduce the number of storage tanks in the field (which have a tendency to leak emissions when seals erode over time), and use much less land to harvest their product.

“With everything being piped into one large facility and with large pipelines tied to it, you’re absolutely reducing the overall truck traffic, the dust issues, the interference with farmers and ranchers operations over time, substantially while you’re doing a better job of harvesting the mineral resources.”

Noble and Anadarko helped facilitate that centralization of operations by a recent 100,000-acre land swap that essentially put Noble’s operations and wells in the southern portion of the county and Anadarko’s in the northeast.

“That ties directly back to environmental impact we’ll all have on the community,” Kelly said. “Will make it that much better and cleaner as go forward.”

Anadarko, too, has been working toward centralizing oil and gas operations.

“In terms of environmental protection and safety, we’ll no longer have tanks on location to store oil; all will be transferred, and don’t have to have flares,” Bracken said. “It’s all at one centralized facility, so it’s easier to maintain and control and, in terms of the environmental benefit on the air quality side, that’s a huge win for us.”

The day will come when all of the existing wells in the field, including vertical wells, can be tied into centralized facilities, he said, so the only thing visible to the naked eye will be the small well head.

It will continue to be a challenge, however.

“I think ours is more of a challenge of how fast we can reduce our footprint and still be a viable industry,” Holloway said. “It’s air pollution, water use, the whole gamut. It isn’t one Achilles heel. Everything needs to improve.”